If the outcome of the race is close — and polling heading into election day indicates it is — low turnout among voters of color could make or break the election. But both Schimel and Crawford are white, and neither party has particularly tailored its message to voters of color.
That’s a sign, some Democrats worry, that the party hasn’t found a way to stop the erosion of support among its voters of color that cost them in battlegrounds across the country – including in Wisconsin last year.
“My biggest concern for the closing stretch is that we [expect] that Elon Musk’s hatred is gonna get the job done,” said Mandela Barnes, the state’s former Democratic lieutenant governor who now runs Power to the Polls Wisconsin, which works to turn out diverse communities throughout the state. Amid overall voter exhaustion, that may not be enough.
Barnes, a longtime organizer in the state who narrowly lost a bid to become the state’s first Black senator three years ago, is concerned that by focusing on the negative associations with Musk Democrats are failing to, again, articulate a definitive reason for voters of color to show up to the polls.
Progressive activists, including Milwaukee-based Angela Lang, said voters of color might not be fully engaged in the early months of the second Trump presidency. Lang, who heads the community outreach organization Black Leaders Organizing for Communities, said when her organization is canvassing low-propensity voters in some majority Black neighborhoods, there remains a measurable voter hangover from former Vice President Kamala Harris’ stinging loss just four years after former President Joe Biden beat Trump in the state.
“Naturally there’s voter fatigue,” Lang said. “People are still upset about November and are like: ‘Damn, we gotta vote all over again? I don’t even want to do any of this’ – there is some of that.”
Still, she is hoping Democrats can exploit Musk’s involvement in the contest to their benefit. “A motivating factor for some folks is that you have this unelected bureaucrat billionaire who doesn’t even live in Wisconsin, a member of the Trump administration, trying to buy our highest court,” she said.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court race has broken spending records for a judicial election with more than $80 million spent by both sides. Musk himself has spent more than $18 million on the race alone, even offering to give $1 million to two attendees of his Green Bay rally on Sunday who had voted for Schimel only to delete the post when others raised concerns he could be violating state law if he followed through on it.
Wisconsin Republicans are laughing off this characterization of Musk, suggesting Democrats are pushing the Musk narrative as a distraction.
“They are scrambling because they are in such disarray at the national level, and they don’t know where to go,” said a GOP operative granted anonymity to speak freely about the race. “Basically, they are doing the same thing they did with Trump, just using a different boogeyman.”
There’s also some trepidation from Wisconsin’s Latino community that they’ve not been engaged at the level necessary to impact the Supreme Court contest.
“I think there is concern that while there has been some outreach to the Hispanic community, I don’t think anyone’s felt that they’ve been reached out to in earnest,” said Darryl Morin, president and CEO of the Forward Latino, a Wisconsin-based organization that engages Hispanic voters.
Complicating Democrats’ push to retain control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court seat is a down-ballot race for the state superintendent of public instruction. It too is a contest that features two white candidates, but the conservative-backed candidate Brittany Kinser won the endorsement of the state’s largest Black newspaper Milwaukee Community Journal last month over the incumbent and Democrat-backed Jill Underly.
“The reality is, Milwaukee is doing very poorly as it relates to educating minority students, whether they’re Black or Brown,” said Wisconsin GOP strategist Bill McCoshen.
He said Republicans have changed their own strategy since their 2023 state Supreme Court loss, including running stronger candidates that appeal to a broader slice of the electorate like Kinser and Schimel.
“I don’t know that either of the Supreme Court candidates have done a good or even okay job reaching out to minorities,” McCoshen said. “But if they’re breaking anyway, it’s certainly for Kinser in the superintendent’s race.”
Both sides are casting the Supreme Court contest as a race about the future of the republic. Indeed, a number of high profile cases are expected to come before the seven-judge body in the near future including on abortion, collective bargaining of public sector unions and a possible challenge to the state’s congressional maps. But those abstract concepts may not be galvanizing issues to low-propensity voters who tend to be more motivated by kitchen table economic issues.
“It’s exhausting to have democracy on the line in election after election after election,” said Ben Wikler, the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party,, before leaning into rhetoric Democrats were pushing hard in the final weekend before Election Day that a “criminal scheme” was being hatched by Musk and Trump to buy Wisconsin elections. He then added a familiar line about how the party is, one again, framing the election.
“This is the make or break election before the midterms,” he said.
Adam Wren contributed to this report.
